


me and my friends are lonely

by pristinus



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Developing Relationships, F/M, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Multi, On the Run, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Rating May Change, Sam Wilson Is A Good Friend, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 12:52:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15315915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pristinus/pseuds/pristinus
Summary: Set in between Civil War and Infinity War.You’re a rogue avenger who’s on the run across the United States with Steve, Sam, and a recovering Bucky.





	me and my friends are lonely

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter establishes the plot for what's to come, things will start happening in chapter two. Slow burn will be slow, 'you' get a personality in this instead of being a Mary Sue (read end chapter notes for clarification on that), and oh, in case you didn't check the tags, this features polyamory, so be warned.
> 
> Also. You're an avenger in this, so I gave you Scarlet Witch's powers, just because. I hope that isn't a turn off, her abilities are pretty cool in my opinion.
> 
> Fic title is from a song called 'Me and My Friends Are Lonely' by Matt Maeson.
> 
> This fic is unbeta'd.

The first room of many sets all the wrong kinds of standards. It’s uncharacteristically big, three cream-colored walls contrasted by a red one, all bright lamps and wooden floors. There’s a modern TV set placed in between two queen sized beds, and an office-like space by the right corner, a black leather chair making it the perfect spot for Sam to set up his laptop and activate his security drones, which he made sure to place in five strategic points across the hotel. 

“And… we’re good.” Sam announces, easing his shoulders and letting his back hit the chair in a discreet sigh of relief. Steve looks over and seems more at ease too, and Bucky makes his way out of examining the bathroom, no visible concerns in his face either.

Four nights ago when you, Sam, Scott, and Clint were broken free of the Raft by Steve, Nat fled the bunch of you to Clint’s homestead in Iowa. The sense of quietness provided by thick grass fields and scattered huddles of oak trees made the farm seem like the perfect haven for a night’s sleep (and maybe more nights to come), but you knew you couldn’t stay. It was Clint’s home after all, not a common hiding spot for war criminals, and the feds were expected to show up at any time from that point onward. His wife and three kids couldn’t have superheroes sleeping in the barn indefinitely, not to mention there were singularities to be sorted out, like _the Bucky situation_. Steve, of course, was the first to say it aloud, like the good leader that he is. 

But it led to inevitable separation. Nat fled to Russia, Clint insisted that Scott stayed a bit longer, and the rest of you were picked up by a crazy fancy wakandan hovercraft. Two hours later and you were emerged in the most incredible place you’d ever seen in your life. You met Shuri, a bright young woman whose intelligence and wit seemed to run the place, and had to smile at the comicality of a five foot four girl bossing a bunch of adults around. Nevertheless, she seemed to know what she was doing, so you left her to her devices. 

Upon deciding Bucky had to spend the night in the lab with Shuri so she could figure out the best way to work through the problem, T’Challa offered you, Steve, and Sam, shelter for the night. Bad news came in the morning, though, and the look of irreparable hollowness Steve carried around in the following hours was all you needed to know it in your heart that you had to offer help, in the only way you knew how. 

“I can’t promise you it’ll work, Steve,” you said, apologetically crossing your arms over your chest. “But if it does, he’ll be free. You won’t have to say goodbye again.”

Bucky’s mind was foggier than most. 

It was like being in a dream: you didn’t know where things started and where they ended, and you couldn’t pick out any colors. It was warm in some places and burning cold in others, and the overwhelming intensity of feelings made you dizzy in your own head. You persisted, though, wandering through the empty spaces, digging deeper into the memories until you found what you’d been looking for. What took you by surprise wasn’t how vulnerable the memories surrounding the root cause of the problem were, but the brutality inflicted into that man’s mind to make sure it stayed in place. 

Once you were done erasing the code, they tried to activate it again. You insisted they didn’t tie him down, you were sure it had worked. Not to mention you’d easily overpowered Vision and the Hulk before, keeping a triggered Bucky under control wouldn’t be a problem for you.

It did work. And after one more very well-slept night in Wakanda, T’Challa gifted Bucky with a new vibranium arm (his way of apologizing for almost killing him several times), offered to drop the lot of you at a place of your choice and promised discreet wakandan hospitality needed you a place to find shelter in the future.

So here you are now, in a borough which according to Sam is the county seat of Pennsylvania’s Cumberland County, in the first hotel room of what you expect to be many. The plan is to keep heading south to North Carolina where it’s expected to have a smaller flux of cops and agents actively searching for rogue avengers. You're supposed to stay on the move and ‘always keep an eye over your shoulder’, Captain’s orders and all of that.

“I call dibs on the shower.” You announce, to Sam’s despair. You beat him by a nanosecond.

“That’s alright,” Sam throws his hands up in surrender when Steve shoots him a look. “We’re all gentlemen here yeah, you can go.”

You let out a snort at the fact that Steve shot him the eye over something as silly as chivalry. 

It’s been that way since your first encounter: the guy couldn’t find it in him to be rude even as your hex balls tossed him ten feet into the air. And after all that went down with Ultron, he not only took you into the team but under his wings. Even when the shame and regret seemed too crushing to bear, even after letting control slip away and causing more damage to people who did nothing to deserve it, he couldn’t find it in him to reprehend you. ‘Happens to the best of us,’ and ‘one day you’ll realize this job takes more than it gives, and this stuff will stop eating you alive’. Thinking back into the present, you can’t help but internally smile at the fact that the feds may be working hard to find you, but Steve Rogers’ forever polite hundred-year-old self is working harder.

In the shower, the water boils your skin raw, cuts and scratches from last week’s fight almost fully healed by now. You didn’t get tossed around nearly as much as Steve, Bucky, and that unknown Spider-guy did, but you still have a couple of bruises here and there, mostly from landing in the wrong way or getting caught by surprise. You wash them off almost harshly, soap getting deep into your pores and cleansing you from the restlessness the past few days have caused in you. 

None of you seem too keen on going out to grab a bite (or doing much of anything besides lying in bed and dying for a few hours), so you end up downing a crappy cheese sandwich and a toddler-sized bottle of orange juice. You don’t know whether you dose off as Sam thoroughly explains the plot of ‘Die Hard’ to a confused Steve or when they find out the hotel TV is equipped with a Netflix account (which, by chance, has two of the movies from the original trilogy) but it must’ve been somewhere in between those two moments, because there’s credits rolling down a screen when you’re startled back to consciousness in what feels like hours later. 

Sam’s got a pillow covering his face as he lies in the furthest edge of the bed you’re sharing, which is a weird view to be met with. You take into consideration that a) he was probably worried you’d feel uncomfortable were he standing too close and, b) he probably fell asleep with the pillow above his head instead of underneath it by accident. So, you decide to put him out of his misery, quietly scooting over to his side of the bed and lifting the pillow off his head. He half-awakens when you gently lift his head up to fit the pillow under him but falls asleep just as quickly once it’s settled in its rightful place.

Scanning the room, you spot a peaceful Bucky lying on his stomach on the bed beside yours. If you focus hard enough, you can hear his shallow breathing into the pillow, shoulders moving up and down in a synchronized manner. You take a dip into his mind, a quick in and out to make sure he’s free of any nightmares, and he is. His whole aura seems to be more at ease, a palpable change from what it used to be like before you wiped the code off his mind.

“Can’t sleep?” 

You feel like a child getting caught eating candy ten minutes before dinner as Steve walks back into the room from what could only have been the bathroom. You didn’t notice he was gone, your powers and Bucky’s mind seeming to pull into each other like magnets, too pre-occupied to care.

You decide to go for the ‘maybe he didn’t notice I was prying into his best friend’s mind without his consent’ route and play it cool.

“Think I can. Kinda just woke up al’of a sudden, might’ve been the music coming from the TV.” You say in a low voice, letting your head hit the pillow again. “Can you?” 

He sits on the edge of the bed and runs his hands through the sheets, finding the TV remote and turning it off. There’s nothing but a shred of light coming from the crack of the bathroom’s door now, but you can see him lying back on the bed. He sighs.

“Maybe. I don’t know. It comes and goes,” he sounds tired, worn out from the stress you’ve all been through. It’s crazy to think that a week ago you were comfortably sleeping in your own rooms at the Avengers compound, safe and sound from any exterior threats, and now you’re struggling to find a place in a world that doesn’t seem to want you anymore. “I’ll sleep for a bit, wake up, fall asleep again. Guess that’s the hand I’ve been dealt.” He huffs out a breath, a hopeless mock of the situation you currently find yourselves in.

Truth is, it’s always seemed to you that Steve carries too much weight for his shoulders to bear. His silent, controlled martyr doesn’t go unnoticed by the perceptive empathy you’ve acquired since discovering your powers. It emanates off of you in slow, steady waves, swallowing whole any emotionally charged presence it comes across. Being around people is a lot harder when you can no longer see the mask they put on. With Steve, it’s worse: you’re an agonizing bystander, holding back the urge to tell him he doesn’t have to pretend, not when he’s around you. 

“I’m sorry.” You mutter after a minute or two, uncertain which grounds to step on. “I could help you sleep, if you want.” He’s on his back, staring at the ceiling, and you can tell he’s considering your offer, even if just for a moment. 

“No, it’s alright.” He whispers back, stubborn as ever. “I’ll be okay. You should go back to sleep, don’t let me keep you up.”

You give him a quiet smile before turning on your back and pulling the covers higher up your torso. “Good night then, Steve.” 

Your eyes are closed, but you can feel him smile as he huffs a ‘G’night’ in response, your body giving out to exhaustion and falling back into a deep slumber before you can say anything else.

 

***

 

Everything happens too fast the next morning. You’re up at six and with a full belly by six and a half, bags packed and ready to go. Sam was up even earlier, examining overnight security footage and making sure you were clear to leave. At seven o’clock you’re sitting in the passenger seat of a ’99 honda civic, wondering how in the hell Bucky (a six-foot-tall, two-hundred-and-forty-pound mammoth) and Sam (also a six-foot-tall, slightly lighter mammoth) fit into the tiny, door-less backseat of the outdated car.

It’s all pine roads after that. 

At noon, you’re at a diner in West Virginia, biting on a tuna sandwich and cheese fries, a combo which you imagine is going to give you a hard time in the bathroom later, but you find that you're too starved to care. Steve and Bucky talk about the past again, like you've often witnessed them doing these past few days, and there’s a bitter sweetness to how the sunlight peaks through the blinds of the diner and paints a straight line in the middle of your booth. 

Bucky points out he’d never been to Virginia before, not even before the war, and Steve concurs, pointing out they’d never left New York because they never had any money to spare. 

Sam calls them out on their shit, saying they should learn how to talk to people who are alive now instead of acting like life’s just one big nostalgia play between the two of them, and Bucky throws a fry at him. 

Here’s the thing, though, Sam doesn’t hesitate to fight back when provoked, and a cheddar-covered fry ends up landing on your hair. That’s when you join the argument and tell them to knock it off, but then Sam looks straight into your eyes and throws a fry at your face. From that point on, it’s up to Steve to settle the fight, and eventually you’re all fit into the tiny car again, Sam in the passenger seat this time around because neither you nor Steve trust him and Bucky to be around each other too long.

Time on the road passes by the way it did when you were a kid, slow and meaningful, like it doesn’t want to move at all. At a certain point everybody gives up on talking altogether and you’re left with a familiar song playing from an old CD, which Steve tells you came with the rented car, a much-needed background noise that has you resting your head against the unopenable glass window on your side of the vehicle.

It isn’t too awful. As the sun sets behind the wall of pines, the endless roads ahead are like piano keys on a lullaby, pulling you closer to the edges of sleep as they’re played.

**Author's Note:**

> As you can tell, I gave “you” a personality in this. It might not be compatible with the way you actually are, but let’s think it through: you’re an avenger. Meaning you’re a valuable asset to a team of incredible people. Meaning you can’t be a Mary Sue. Here’s another thing: Wanda Maximoff doesn’t exist in this little universe of mine. Instead, I gave you her powers, and only half of her backstory (you don’t actually have a dead twin brother, but you do have a traumatic past, which I think is a necessary drive to every hero). So yes! You are a hero in this. An adjusting one at that. 
> 
> I could make you entirely neutral, just like every other reader-insert does, but that wouldn’t single you out from a crowd; and if you can’t be singled out from a crowd, there’s no reason why you should stand side to side with Captain Freakin’ America, the world’s greatest hero. Think of yourself in this as a version of what you would be in the Marvel universe, not the version of you that you currently are in the real world. That being said, I hope you enjoy what's about to come!


End file.
